Broccolini flowers and another bed ready for planting!

We decided to make the most of the warm weather this weekend by clearing the broccolini (pic no.1) that was going to seed so we could get another vegie bed ready for planting. Broccolini or anything from the cabbage family are heavy feeders from what I’ve read, so I wasn’t surprised to find the soil underneath (pic no.2) looking dry, dusty and depleted once we had yanked them all out.

Now that I think back, I probably should have continued watering to keep the bed moist as the soil was starting to become water repellent from being allowed to dry out as much as it did. Anyways I’ll just have to try and remember not to make the same mistakes next year and take it as another lesson learnt!

Afterwards I put the following on top ready to be mixed in:

1 × 60 litre tub of home made compost

1 × 30 litre bag of shop bought compost

200 grams Yates Professional Blood & Bone (NPK 8-5-1)

100 grams of phosphoruos (NPK 0-15-0)

100 grams of potassium (NPK 0-0-40)

Now my maths isn’t very good, infact it’s shocking to be honest, but my aim was to try and get as close to a NPK ratio of 8-2-10 once all the above ingredients were mixed in and turned over to a depth of about 30cms which is roughly a spades depth. Also to help the water penetrate the soil I sprinkled 4-5 handfuls of granular soil wetter/saturaid over the top of the soil and scratched it into the top layer with a garden fork, then covered the whole bed in sugarcane mulch (pic no.4) and hosed it all in.

I think your meant to leave it to settle for a month once you do this but I’m not organised or patient enough so I often plant straight into it the day after! Anyways I grabbed a handful of the soil today and it looked like the water had penetrated about 15cms down and it felt cool & crumbly so I was happy!

ps: if anyone knows what numbers I should be aiming for or can calculate th ratio’s for me that would be really helpful!

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